Sony Hack Leads To Postponement of Earnings

The U.S. government claims it has strong evidence that North Korea was the perpetrator, but the impact of last year’s Sony Pictures hack is still not fully quantified. Parent company Sony announced on Friday, January 23rd that it has postponed its third quarter earnings report by 45 days because of remaining uncertainty about the cyber attack on Sony Pictures in November 2014.

In its filing for a delay, Sony claims the “highly sophisticated and damaging cyberattack” on Sony Pictures caused “a serious disruption of SPE’s network systems (…) including the destruction of network hardware.” The filing goes on to note that a result, many of Sony Pictures’ financial, accounting and other tech applications won’t be fully operational until early Feb. 2015.

Of note, parent company Sony will hold a press conference and webcast on February 4, 2015, but the actual earnings report will be not be finished or filed at that date. Sony has previously commented and still currently believes the impact of the cyber attack on its financial results will be “not material.”

More on the November Sony Pictures hack

The cyber attack on Sony Pictures last fall is widely seen as one of the biggest and most damaging cyber attacks in history. The attack exposed a huge amount of corporate data to the public, including email messages from senior company execs, unfinished movie scripts, projected earnings for upcoming movies and a lot of other data. The U.S. government has pointed the finger at a team of quasi-official North Korean hackers as the culprits in the attack.

Subsequent threats of violence from the hackers after the attack led Sony to cancel The Interview, a comedy about a fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, December theatrical release. The movie was eventually released online and at selected theaters later in December, bringing in $15 million in its first four days.